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Deploying the smart city also has explicitly spatial consequences. In India, for example, a recent lecture by
Ayona Datta (Nov 2016)
at Newcastle University demonstrated that the rehabilitation of existing cities into smart cities has been associated with gentrification and mobilisation of young middle-class values rather than social equity, supported by governance practices that resembled more Foucault’s governmentality (
see Swyngedouw 2005
) than truly open public engagement. The construction of the smart city could be likened to
David Harvey’s account
of Baron Hausmanns’ total reconstruction of Paris, a grand socio-technological and political project which channelled massive capital accumulation by sanitizing the French capital both socially and physically, erasing the possibility of future social unrest within the city. As Ayona Datta argued in her presentation, however, there is no one single manifestation of the smart city: only global discourses that take root locally in many different ways, pervaded and appropriated by local socio-cultural and political dynamics.

Some cities are beginning to address resilience differently. For the City of Boston, for example,
resilience starts by addressing race and equity
. Resilience, beyond its co-optation by the global smart city project, refers first and foremost to bouncing back from shocks and crises, which may stand in the background of technological development. Particularly, technological innovation may fall short of supporting disaster relief purposes.
Womens 0DG4304 309813 Sunglasses Pink/Pinkgradient 57 Dolce amp; Gabbana Cl9qwY0Vn
in New Orleans: the maps of devastated areas reflected clear socio-economic/racial boundaries in the city. The need to address socio-cultural inequalities is central to the smart, resilient, sustainable city.

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Marco Rogers
loves interviewing engineers. Here’s a quick back-of-the-napkin showing just how much: he’s been an engineering leader and hiring manager for the last seven years. Over that time, he’s hired over 80 engineers. To fill each of those roles, he’s personally interviewed approximately 5 candidates on average after initial phone screens. That’s at least 400 interviews, or an in-person interview every work week for seven years — and that’s not counting time dedicated to prep, screening, references or debriefs. Most impressive is that he’s designed a system that has gotten his technical teams involved — and energized — to interview their future colleagues. To him, interviewing is a
team
priority: engineers on his team who are seasoned interviewers can conduct 12-16 interviews per month.

For those who’ve seen him in action, it’s inevitable that Rogers ended up at a recruiting software startup like
Lever
. Every engineering leader spends time on building and rebuilding teams, but while at
Clover Health
and
Yammer
, Rogers obsessed on designing and refining an immaculate interview process. It was that craftsmanship that helped him hire over a dozen developers at Yammer, grow the Clover engineering team from one to 50, and start to scale up Lever’s technical team.

In this exclusive interview, Rogers starts by debunking some of the common recruiting tropes, explaining why they are outdated or misleading. Then he spotlights his top four interviewing practices — and how they fit within his broader recruiting methodology. Lastly, he recommends the first, low-hanging change that startups can make to retrofit their interview process.

THE REFRAIN
: “We test the technical knowledge and skills needed for the role in the interview.”

THE REFRAIN

THE REALITY
: You don’t actually know what you need. You’re figuring out what you need.